ISR News Story

Srivastava & Bar-Cohen Deliver Tutorial at SEMI-THERM29

Associate Professor Ankur Srivastava (ECE/ISR) and Professor Avram Bar-Cohen (Mechanical Engineering) held an evening tutorial on March 19 at the 29th Annual IEEE Thermal Measurement, Modeling and Management Symposium (SEMI-THERM29). The tutorial addressed “Microfluidic Thermal Management and Thermal-Electronic Co-Design for Chip Stacks.” The symposium was held in San Jose, CA. The focus of SEMI-THERM is to provide an annual forum for the exchange of latest technical developments in thermal management of electronic devices, components and systems. This is accomplished by providing a multifaceted program of events of interest to developers, practitioners and researchers from academia and industry. The symposium is dedicated to providing an informal atmosphere, which highlights the latest advances in the field.

Their evening tutorial focused on three-dimensional chip stacking, which is poised to become the next packaging paradigm in the electronic industry. While this paradigm provides significant improvements in device density, interconnect delays, and system integration, it can be expected to lead to higher heat densities and decreased access to chip hot spots and surfaces. Intrachip and interchip microfluidic cooling, with low boiling point, inert, dielectric liquids, is a most promising thermal management technique for this packaging paradigm, but aggressive thermal-electronic co-design is needed to achieve improved performance and energy efficiency. The tutorial presented a brief review of the emerging 3D form factors, application of microfluidic cooling, a codesign heuristic, and a Case Study exploring the benefits of co-optimization of micro-channel allocation and thermal TSV planning on chip stack performance.

The program for SEMI-THERM29 included four days of presentations, keynote addresses, workshops, and courses dedicated to thermal management and innovation that would keep today’s technology cool and operating optimally.